Generic ideological tangents are particularly tedious and off topic. We don't need yet another flamewar about "Western civilization" or "the value of reason" or whatever. An internet forum is not capable of producing anything new about anything so grandiose—only pomposity and anger.
And your closing remark just sounds like an attack on the pitch of his voice, further weakening your argument, such as it is.
Saying "too much water is bad" or "water is not good when your problem is that your socks are wet" is not an attack on water itself. You waterists should all calm down.
Maybe I’m paranoid, but in experience what comes next is typically some mystic mumbo-jumbo or talk about things we “just can’t understand” etc. then usually the speaker is religious.
I’d be happy to be wrong. The religion argument is just boring.
One problem is that the more nuanced and plausible weaker versions of empiricism are not held by a number of prominent thinkers in the sciences. Instead, many of them (experts in their respective domains) continue to believe in and espouse semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable versions of empiricism.
Whether Bach actually does is perhaps arguable. What the parent was referring to when he mentioned western rationality being myopic at times is probably something like what I described above.
Then if you see emotions as a subset of rationality, then it's again your rational view of the world and how you make sense of it, but it's not the position held by most people.
I've never read a book specific to this topic but if you want one, here's one that looks good, engineer-friendly and simple enough: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/outer-limits-reason
But as far as I know there's no proof that consciousness is beyond the limits of reason. The mere fact that reason is limited is not a universal argument against all rational discussion.
I'm not really that much in the debate about consciousness but I'm a lot into the one about intelligence: there are many definitions of intelligence and none of them seems satisfying. You can define intelligence from a rational point of view, as some kind of function or model, but it's extremely narrow, arbitrary and limited. That's the trick he uses. To me it's not enough. The very idea of intelligence is restrictive, antropocentric and confusing. That's because with the existing tools we have (including reason) we cannot converge to a satisfying idea of intelligence, that eludes our analysis.
Can you mention some non-rational ways you think are better?
I find it difficult to use logic when a) you don't really know all the premises that you're starting from and b) you have a material / emotional / ideological / or identity-driven stake in the outcome.
If you have a simple closed system where you can know how everything works and you're just trying to get the system to some state, then logic is very good for that.
If you have a more complex system where you are open to being wrong about premises and are open to reworking those premises when you come to paradoxes, that seems okay.
Unfortunately much of my life has come down to systems where I have to just give up having a rational view of a process or object and intuit my way through things or guess about stuff. Simply guessing is a rational process, but I do it a lot in my life.
Or, conversely I've occasionally rationalized my into believing things about the world that aren't true because I wanted them to be true.
I've seen other folks do that often. I've seen a lot of people make technical decisions where they think they are using a "superior" technology when in fact they are driven by a fear of missing out, a need to identify with what they think is cool technology, or simply need to find a solution to a technical problem so they don't have to solve a more difficult to solve non-technical problem.
Does it being difficult mean that other approaches are better? Point b is basically saying you have a vested interest (emotionally) in it (the topic, whatever it may be) being a certain way. Foregoing rationality and logic in favour of something else isn’t going to get you better results. Most often, it means you will instead argue based on feelings and emotion. Better would be to find a way to take a step back and re-evaluate your stance.
As for point a, the only solution I can see to that is to seek more information.
When you discover a non-logical way of making progress on one of those types of problems do you attempt to re-use that approach on other problems of that same type? Or perhaps change the approach slightly to account for the slightly different nature of the problem? If so then you're using rationality/logic.
>I've seen other folks do that often.
The observation you're making is that they're not being logical/rational, but rather merely pretending to be.
Do you want to include in your model of the world knowledge that cannot be obtained with rationality? Well, then you should use something that is different than rationality.
As a society we held rationality above everything else for a couple of centuries thanks to illuminism. Yes, it helped a lot and rationality is a good tool to solve a lot of problems. Is it a perfect tool? No. Is it an omnipotent tool? Is it the tool to kill all the other tools? No. Luckily, as a society, in the last century we began to understand the limits of rationality and we are slowly transitioning to a world where rationality is used only in the context where it belongs, acknoledging its limits. The same happend with religion. In the past we used religion to explain everything and it wasn't good. Then we said: "Ok, religion takes the spot of religion and just that". The same is happening with rationality but engineers didn't take note yet, pretty much as priests took a while to be content with their spot (and still try to make religion leak in other parts of society).
Why is the race, age, gender or ethnicity of the thinker relevant to the credibility of their ideas?
Race, gender and class in this case are clearly connected because he embodies all the stereotypes of the white male STEMlord. It makes sense, he summarized readings from others like him to appeal to a crowd of people like him. The crowd is becoming aware of this echo-chamber/safe-space for engineer and questions his motives, because they have been fed the same ideas over and over and he doesn't challenge them but just reinforces them.
You're absolutely right: our thoughts and ideas are biased and impure. That's why it's so important to test them with science and reason.
Also for example, mathematics and physics are usually fields that rarely have direct applications and most of the time they provide tools for other fields. What if the physics and maths we have now, or the way we frame the problems these fields should solve, are biased? What if this bias is preventing the creation of useful tools for other fields?
The problem is that we must acknowledge the impossibility to "think outside of the box" of reason. By doing so we open ourselves to a wider spectrum of possible discoveries and constructions, even within science and engineering. What exists might not be biased in itself, but the fact that we reached some results instead of others is dependant on cultural biases that exist outside the field itself and inside the individuals and organizations pursuing science and engineering.
It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in. The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.
And not with any specific objection, but simply with attacks on reason itself.
Reason itself can understand its limits. That's a good thing, we are lucky and we got to that poitn.
> It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in.
Nobody is forbidding anything, as long as you don't make it dangerous. Excesses of reason led to great crimes in the last centuries but this is not the case.
> The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.
Reason can explain mental processes for sure: it's called neuroscience and it's a thriving field. But consciousness or intelligence are not only about mental processes. I mean, you can believe so but then we say your opinions are naive, because there's plenty of evidence that mechanicism is not enough to explain human experience. We are not attacking this video, we are criticizing it for making the same mistakes of so many reductionists before him. If the attacks seem vague is because probably you're missing the whole discourse going on in the last 20 years in the Philosophy of Mind and related fields.
Also reason is not sacred, get over it.
"You can believe [something] but then we say your opinions are naive" is not actually an argument, nor is it productive discussion.
https://books.google.it/books?id=r0Bf3lLys6AC&printsec=front...
https://books.google.it/books?id=OVGna4ZEpWwC&printsec=front...
These are just a couple of modern books with an anti-reductionist approach.
It simply says "i was wrong about all those other things, but this next thing you can't explain in principle, because reasons (many books of untestable claims here)".
Even if we assume that consciousness or intelligence cannot be explained by physics, the anti-reductionist position still doesn't add anything because we need to try to explain it with physics anyway to find out that it is not possible.
I can tell you I'll never read those books. Philosophy is a field that's never contributed anything useful and never actually reached a conclusion on anything.
Perhaps one day we'll really understand intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps not. But if we do, I'm confident the answers will come from neuroscience, psychology, and/or AI, rather than philosophy.
Without epistemology there's no science. Period. Science needs philosophy because they have two complementing roles. If philosophy (or non-scientific thinking in general) doesn't define concepts, science has nothing to work with. Science's role is not to make up concepts. Sometimes a single person does that during scientific inquiry but he's stepping outside of science's responsability and ill-defined concepts created so many complications throughout science's history. Just think about psychiatry.
> and philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry.
Big citation needed.
> Perhaps one day we'll really understand intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps not. But if we do, I'm confident the answers will come from neuroscience, psychology, and/or AI, rather than philosophy.
That's not the point. For sure the scientific understanding of intelligence and consciousness will come from science. The role of philosophy is different: it's to define what's the intelligence your trying to make sense of, it's trying to frame the problem you want to solve with science, it's about pointing science towards the evidence you want to model and let it do its course because now the exchange is always been: "Go science, fetch there" and science replied "there's nothing there, but I've found neurons". "Oh nice, let's try there", "Still nothing, but I've found networks in the brain and processing in the visual cortex and the rest of the body", "Umh, weird. Maybe it's an emergent property". "Try there" and so on. Neuroscientists are heavily involved in philosophy in the first place because this back and forth is much more intense than in other fields and there's evidently something wrong in how the problem is framed.
That's certainly not true. Physical concepts were invented by the physicists. Viruses, bacteria, prions, etc were discovered by biologists. Algorithms were invented by computer scientists and mathematicians. Philosophers had very little if anything to do with it.
> philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry
If I'm wrong about this you can easily prove it. Just point me to the evidence-based philosophy.
> the exchange is always been: "Go science, fetch there"
No philosopher pointed the way for Einstein or Planck or Euler. You could claim that they were practicing a non-scientific mode of thought but it was based on a scientific, not philosophical, education, and personally I think that's a very narrow, mechanical view of science.
I don't mean to completely dismiss your chosen field. There might be value in it that I'm not seeing, and even if it's merely interesting but unproductive there's still value in that.
I just mean to say two things: 1) it's not for me, and 2) when it intersects with other fields philosophers need to contribute something more specific/productive than "you should read these philosophy books". Practitioners of different fields collaborate by sharing relevant information, not by expecting people in other fields to learn their field.
I am most interested in the fact that he said that his theory could not be improved by drawing on thinkers from other cultures. Why? Because his theory itself implies that other cultures have things to contribute.
As he said, cultures have more intelligence (i.e. better theory creation powers) than individuals. One would guess, then, that he would say a good theory should maximize the number of cultures it draws from and the degree to which it draws from them.
However his theory is at best the product of one culture or at worst (and I think this is what he implied in his question and answer response) the product of one individual.
How ironic that this should pop up in a post that is nothing but an ad-hominem rant.
As someone who is fairly steeped in the rationality-loving tradition and those ways of making sense of the world that are common in tech, I'd ask the following:
Can you or someone else on this thread point to a gentle introduction to the types of thought besides rationality that you're thinking of and how they're grounded? Is it possible for someone who accepts rationality to follow and credit these arguments without having to take any new beliefs as axiomatic?
Put another way, can rationality guide me at least part way to some of these other things?
This is the substance of Sam Harris's career and his debates with Peterson. It's a fundamental unknown if you can base metaphorical conversations in rationality.
Peterson will make biological/scientific arguments for religious metaphorical stories and Sam will reduce everything back to what is only groundable. Sam will then go on to argue we should only agree on the metaphors or qualia that are undeniable, burning fingers on hot stoves as a guaranteed shared experience and metaphor. If you can bridge the gap between rationality and metaphor you have found meaning (according to Peterson) or a million billion dollars if you have some business skills and world peace.
EDIT: Sorry, this was probably more fundamental than gentle..
There is a logic to metaphor. If you believe that touching the stove with your finger will give you a burning sensation and you believe that others experience roughly the same as you, you can build the metaphor that others consciously experience pain. It's not based on the objective scientific understanding of the pain chemicals in someone's consciousness, but you reasoned up from your own experience into someone else's.
The question is best answered by exploring where you perceive the edge of metaphor vs rationality to be.
Examples? Economic models of society. Lesswrong.com. Joscha Bach’s talk.
Rationality is not the answer to life, the universe and everything. (It’s 42.)
Christianity is happy to have 'magic' leaps of faith. That's what magic is, reasoning up from truth. Joscha calling magic impossible, is in itself a trap. But overall a lot of the metaphors are the same. For example don't be a pleasure-seeking hippy like the Dude. Christian values are replaced with reward reinforcing structures, but are ultimately the same conversation. The God that Joscha thinks exists and is evil, is a god Christians wouldn't believe in. Taking in all ideas and evaluating them is the same idea across both Christian and Joscha's stories.
It's much of the sameness. For all the disdain for religion, Joscha's ideology and Christianity are both systems of metaphor. I would hope people are making up their own mind on what metaphors to use. I'm curious how many people agree wholesale with Joscha and/or Christianity without niggling disagreements.
FWIW, I interpreted the Dude as not so much a pleasure seeking hippy rather as not a pleasure denying person.
He make an extra effort for people, which isn't pleasure seeking. For example he goes to see his landlord's dance cycle to show support, and in fact the dance cycle is hilariously bad. He also shows concern for bunny, even if it's misplaced.
When he stumbles across the german in the pool black out drunk and learns he's a nihilist and quips, "That sounds exhausting." In other words, the guy seems to have to work pretty hard (getting drunk to the point of being unconscious and proudly proclaiming his beliefs to everyone he meets) at not believing in anything.
The narrator at the end says, "It's good to know the dude is out there taking it easy for all us sinners." The dude simply abides.
Yeah I agree, I rolled in Josch's 'too much meditation is bad' sentiment into that appraisal of the Dude.
The Big Lebowski is the normal world turned upside, a deconstruction of our traditional symbols. The rich guy is a fraud, the trophy wife is a whore, the bad guy doesn't believe in anything or can achieve anything. Jesus is a pedophile (disturbingly prescient :P). The good guy dies pointlessly of a heart attack in a parking lot and nothing ever gets done in the end (does he ever get his rug back?).
At best it's a comedy and worst it's a post modern deconstruction of our normal state of affairs. It's fun, bad and good. I watch it just to see what condition my condition is in, if I can't laugh at it, I need to improve my life conditions :P.
The Dude is just the guy to be the hero of that story, laid back and unconcerned beyond the rug keeping his room whole.
It's a well-worded, better-than-average, STEMlordish explanation of reality but still very limited. The guy is smart but should read more before trying to propose just another theory of reality/mind/everything.
Also your dunning-kruger is showing.
Simple answer to complex problems, outside science and engineering, are almost always wrong. The world is complex and naive answers are not sufficient, even if the subjectively make sense to you.
The guy is part of the establishment you're talking about: reason dominated the humankind for a few centuries and we are just now managing to converge to something better, while still being immersed in a reason-based society that is crumbling, leaving big voids filled by any kind of ideological scum because the post-reason is not here yet. But anyway, your conspiracy of philosophers against engineers has no root in reality and it's just fear of the complexity of the world.
True, but it seems that the universe is simple at its foundation and complex in some of the things that emerge from it.
The standard model fits on a sheet of paper and it commonly makes predictions that are accurate to the ~20th decimal place. Neural networks can be expressed in fraction of that complexity and evolution is even simpler. Computations that emerge from these things are often complex beyond our comprehension, and hence it is a good heuristic to distrust simple explanations in the sciences about emergent phenomena such as psychology, sociology, economy and biology.
> Neural networks can be expressed in fraction of that complexity
That's not an explanation. That's a rule to construct them. Same for evolution: one thing is to define a basic rule that underlies a phenomena, another thing is to explain why we like peanut butter and jelly using evolutionary psychology. The basic rule doesn't capture much. And sometimes, maybe, there's not even a basic rule to begin with, because we conflate a lot of stuff in concepts that have no root or relationships in the physical world.
The universe is fractally structured regarding simplicity: It is simple at its foundation upon which we find layers of evidently chaotic processes (e.g. brownian motion, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics), which in turn converge to metastable rule sets that are seemingly simple again (e.g. evolution, neural networks). Unpredictable fluctuation from the chaotic layers below are either exploited as a computational mechanism (e.g. for probabilistic modeling or adaptations of unpredictability in behavior) or averaged out by regulation (homeostasis), so simple rules remain plausible despite the underlying chaos. Those simple rule sets in turn produce complex processes (e.g. psychology, science), which in turn produce simple processes (e.g. game theory, economics). Of course the higher up in this hierarchy, the more unstable rule sets become, e.g. most economic theories make poor predictions, but evolution is an extremely reliable theory.